Monday, October 14, 2013

Animals/Eco - again with a strange set of texts

by KARL STEEL

I'm very fortunate in being able to do an Ecology and Animals seminar at the CUNY Grad Center Spring 2014, which means, once again, I'm sharing my ideas (preliminary share here). I've set myself a constraint, however: Susan Crane is teaching an animals grad course at Columbia right now. On the off chance I draw any of her students to my class, I want to limit overlap with her texts. This means I'm avoiding Yvain, SGGK, the saints' lives of the early North (Cuthbert and Ireland), and hunting material.

Medieval Death and Vermin and other small life: poetry and encyclopedias

Saga of Grettir the Strong

The Canarian, with associated materials on the Canary Islands by Petrarch and Boccaccio

The BIG addition, apart from the saga and The Canarian, whose genre and content will be entirely new to me, at least for teaching, will be Melusine, which I'm doing over 2 weeks in this 1895 EETS edition of the Middle English translation, available for free on archive.org. If you know a better edition, in print and inexpensive and in English, do let me know. It's a text I've never read, but one I think any good medieval animals/monster/eco scholar should know well.

A few principles, then: I'm not wedding myself to "coverage." I'll tell them about the main texts we're not reading, and tell them that any medievalist should know them. But I'm also trying, well, to change the canon. A new focus requires a new set of primary texts, yes?

(and for those agitating for the Chester Noah: maybe I can squeeze it in at the very end?)

3 comments:

I know I've been hectoring you on Twitter about this course's readings, but wanted to say here that I think Grettir's saga works very well via a critical animal studies focus (so found my grad seminar at least). Melusine, I don't know: I'd be reluctant to give two weeks to it. Admittedly it's been a long time since I've looked at French or English versions -- a very long time in fact -- BUT my memory is that it doesn't hold the same complexity as say the ME translation of Bevis of Hampton when it comes to animals. Two weeks is SUCH a long time in a graduate seminar to dedicate to a text...

But also wanted to add: this course will be great, and I wish I could come to NYC once a week to sit in. An OE text like Beowulf might have worked well (or even Guthlac!), and an Hiberno-Latin one like Admonan's vita of St Columba; those would make Grettir seem less of an outlier by shifting you north and west as well as looking at the traditional medievalist French-English-Latin Christendom entanglement. None of these texts are animal-centric but maybe that is what would make them interesting as well?

Will definitely have to read Melusine myself in advance. If I swap it out, I could bring in LATER or EARLIER texts instead to mess with periodization. I've been compiling a list of likely early modern readings.

In re: the North -- could just do Cuthbert and have them read from Crane's book while looking at the Yates Thompson ms with the Cuthbert life. Or could play up the Brendan voyage more along with, say, Ratramnus's Letter on the Cynocephali.